LAS CRUCES - December was vital not only for the New Mexico State football team, but also for the university as the institution pushed its message outside of Las Cruces to recruit potential students to campus.

According to a marketing report from main campus, NMSU football-related stories had an earned media value of $24.4 million from Dec. 1, 2017 through Jan. 2, the majority of which was Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl coverage.

NMSU football stories had "six figure placements" in the Washington Post, Business Insider, USA Today (which, along with the Las Cruces Sun-News, is part of the USA TODAY NETWORK), ESPN.com and Los Angeles Times. There also were placements in India, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

National media monitor company Meltwater has been tracking the earned media since the university purchased a subscription this summer. The December value dwarfed the other months. For comparison's sake, November's report for the entire university yielded $2.7 million in earned media, of which $1.2 was from athletics-related stories.

"The reason we did this is we are in the business of creating news releases and other media and monitoring media on a regular basis," University spokesman Justin Bannister said. "We thought it was a good tool for us to have to be able to put a number on how often NMSU appears in the media and what the value of that coverage is."

The ESPN.com coverage came with an estimated audience of 26 million people, Bannister said.

The Meltwater service calculation excluded broadcast, Bannister said. The 30-second New Mexico State commercial that was carried on the CBS Sports broadcast and in the Arizona Stadium, as well as any of the ESPN SportsCenter features on New Mexico State ending the nation's longest bowl drought, were not tracked as part of NMSU's service with Meltwater.

"In a nutshell, what they (Meltwater) do is they find whatever search parameters we put in, so it was for New Mexico State University football (in December)," Bannister said. "They find those in print and online. They measure the size of those stories and they also estimate the reach of those stories. They estimate what it would cost to buy that equivalent amount of space on those publications."

Also included in the report were:

A crowd funding project that has raised over $36,000 from 150 donors for recruitment and student travel

Eight billboards were purchased around Tucson focused on student recruitment

Social media advertisements and promoted posts in support of the team ran on Facebook and Instagram throughout December

The performance of NMSU’s Google Search ads was maximized for all of New Mexico, El Paso and Arizona for the month of December

Fifteen digital billboards in Las Cruces, El Paso and Albuquerque started by saying “Buy Tickets,” and then switched to “Go Aggies,” and finally to “Congratulations Aggies” throughout December and when the team won

378 posts from NMSU's social media accounts that yielded 178,000 engagements and a total reach of 2.3 million.

"We didn't do it specifically for Aggie football," Bannister said. "We did this for the university as a whole several months ago and as luck would have it, the Aggies went to a bowl game so we were able to run a report for the bowl game coverage."

Sports Editor Jason Groves can be reached at 676-541-5459 or jgroves@lcsun-news.com. Follow him on Twitter @jpgroves.